ames feverish with seven
days and nights of travel. The shekh who conducted them was not an
Aneyzeh, and would have lost his life had they fallen in with any of that
tribe.

Chapter X.

The Visions of Hasheesh.

"Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting,
Possessed beyond the Muse's painting."

Collins.

During my stay in Damascus, that insatiable curiosity which leads me to
prefer the acquisition of all lawful knowledge through the channels of my
own personal experience, rather than in less satisfactory and less
laborious ways, induced me to make a trial of the celebrated
_Hasheesh_--that remarkable drug which supplies the luxurious Syrian with
dreams more alluring and more gorgeous than the Chinese extracts from his
darling opium pipe. The use of Hasheesh--which is a preparation of the
dried leaves of the _cannabis indica_--has been familiar to the East for
many centuries. During the Crusades, it was frequently used by the Saracen
warriors to stimulate them to the work of slaughter, and from the Arabic
term of "_Hashasheen,"_ or Eaters of Hasheesh, as applied to them, the
word "assassin" has been naturally derived. An infusion of the same plant
gives to the drink called "_bhang_," which is in common use throughout
India and Malaysia, its peculiar properties. Thus prepared, it is a more
fierce and fatal stimulant than the paste of sugar and spices to which the
Turk resorts, as the food of his voluptuous evening reveries. While its
immediate effects seem to be more potent than those of opium, its
habitual use, though attended with ultimate and permanent injury to the
system, rarely results in such utter wreck of mind and body as that to
which the votaries of the latter drug inevitably condemn themselves.

A previous experience of the effects of hasheesh--which I took once, and
in a very mild form, while in Egypt--was so peculiar in its character,
that my curiosity, instead of being satisfied, only prompted me the more
to throw myself, for once, wholly under its influence. The sensations it
then produced were those, physically, of exquisite lightness and
airiness--of a wonderfully keen perception of the ludicrous, in the most
simple and familiar objects. During the half hour in which it lasted, I
was at no time so far under its control, that I could not, with the
clearest perception, study the changes through which I passed. I noted,
with careful attention, the fine sensations which spread throughout t